Later Greek Literature: Poetry

Greek literature during the period of the Roman Empire thus displayed a remarkable continuity with the
past. Literary forms that had developed in the Archaic and Classical Periods continued to be pursued, and
the results are nearly indistinguishablein formal terms from their predecessors of hundreds of years
earlier. The epic was always considered to be the highest form of literary creation, and we saw (p. 245)
that the most ambitious poets of the Hellenistic Period sought to continue the tradition of Homeric poetry,
usually on a smaller scale. The same was the case later as well. A poet who went by the name of
Musaeus, for example, about whom we know nothing at all but who seems to have lived in the fifth or
sixth century after Christ, composed an elegant miniature epic that told the tragic love story of Hero and
Leander. Everything about this poem is steeped in the distant past: The focus on the erotic recalls the
poetry of the Hellenistic Period; the language, style, and meter are thoroughly Homeric; and even the
poet's pen name is appropriated from a legendary poet who is supposed to have lived at a time still
earlier than that of Homer.

Not all epic poets of the period, however, exercised the restraint that Musaeus displayed in limiting his
poem to fewer than four hundred lines. A third-century poet from the Greek city of Smyrna, with the
Roman name of Quintus, wrote an epic poem in 14 books that picks up the story of the Trojan War just at
the point at which the Iliad ends, continuing the story to the fall of Troy and the departure of the Greek
heroes for home. Even more ambitious was the fifth-century poet Nonnus, from the Greek city Panopolis
in Egypt, who composed an exuberant epic in 48 books (the combined length of the Iliad and the
Odyssey!) entitled Dionysiaca, concerned with the birth and fabulous adventures of the god Dionysus.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this poem is that its author was apparently Christian. At any rate,
the only other work of his that survives is a recasting in verse of the Gospel according to John, composed
in the same meter (dactylic hexameter) and observing the same Homeric language as his massive epic
about the pagan god of wine.

What we have, then, in the Dionysiaca is a very elaborate literary creation that tries to give the
impression of ignoring everything that had happened in the more than one thousand years since the time of
Homer, including the career of Alexander the Great, the incorporation of Greece into the Roman Empire,
and the advent of Christianity. In fact, Nonnus' subject matter, which includes an extensive account of
Dionysus' campaigns in India, is unimaginable without Alexander's conquests, and Nonnus' style is
heavily influenced by Homer's Hellenistic successors. Nevertheless, Nonnus and, it would seem, his
audience wished to pretend that the poetry written in fifth-century Egypt was indistinguishable in
important respects from that composed in Archaic Greece. The same is true in the case of another poetic
genre that persisted from the Archaic Period to the time of Nonnus and beyond, namely the epigram.
Originally “epigram” simply referred to anything inscribed, most commonly a text either in prose or verse
on a marker for a grave. Already in the Classical Period poets had written epigrams, almost exclusively
in elegiac meter, that were not necessarily composed for inscription on a tombstone. In some cases, these
were not even seriously intended, but were rather jeux d'esprit with playful or satirical intent. Before
long, epigrams came to bewritten that had no funerary connection, dealing instead with poets and the
poetic craft, with the visual arts and, increasingly, with erotic matters.